At Functional Patterns, everything done has a foundation rooted in science. This page is dedicated to giving you a better understanding of the my method. There will be a weekly Vlog of techniques on the Functional Patterns youtube channel. Stay tuned as there is much to learn!

Realignment Techniques

When we repeat dysfunctional patterns over and over again, our bodies get used to staying within the dysfunction rather than changing. For example:

If i was to sit in a desk for 8 hours a day, I would probably end up with a slumped posture, as a result of protracting my shoulders and hunching over to reach the keyboard. Within time, my body would memorize these patterns, tightening muscles throughout the body, until that bad posture was set as a new neuro-muscular pattern. Poor Neuro-muscular patterns increase the chance for injury anytime you move, because they constrict your natural movement.

Correction of these problems is not optional! If you expect to get any kind of sustainability within your movement/exercise regimen, I put alignment techniques at number 1. Also, major muscle groups responsible for strength, explosiveness and agility become inhibited when muscular deficiency is present. You can’t have safety without athleticism because they go hand in hand with each other.

I am a huge advocate of people fixing their own physical problems, all we need is the information mixed with a bit of discipline and we are good to go. Here are a few strategies to you can utilize own your own:

Myofascial Release (massage)

A technique utilized to make muscle tissue that is bound up, unbind. All muscles in the body are wrapped in a web called fascia. When dysfunctional movement patterns are created in muscles, the fascia will effectively develop knot like properties that will impede range of motion in the body. After Myofascial release is implemented, muscle tissue becomes more pliable and will effectively become maliable once again to improve functional movement. Tools of choice: 1.) Lacrosse ball 2.) Medicine Ball 3.) Foam Roller 4.) Theracane 5.) Han Bo with rounded end.

Static Stretching

If practiced enough with the right strategy, static stretching can become a very useful tool in the re-alignment process. The problem I see most with people utilizing static stretching, is stretching muscles that don’t need to be stretched. For instance, most people who stretch their hamstrings all the time may not understand that the root foundation to their tight hamstrings has to deal with another set of muscle groups called, the hip flexors. Your Gluteus Maximus and Hamstrings are the primary muscles involved in hip extension (opposite to hip flexion). The dominant of the two is the Gluteus Maximus. If you happen to have the habit of sitting a few hours a day, there are these muscles on the front part of your pelvis that are going to become tight. These muscles (hip flexors) constrict the movement of the Gluteus Maximus when they are tight, because they work in the opposite motion. Once this happens, the Hamstrings have to take over and become overworked a tight. So the origins of the Hamstring tightness never had to do with the Hamstrings at all. Now if we wanted to correct this problem with the hamstrings, we could use several static stretches to open up the hip flexors. This would allow the Gluteus Maximus to mobilize, and now the hamstrings wouldn’t have to overwork anymore. If we can understand why we stretch the muscles we are stretching, static stretching can be an immensely useful tool in your arsenal.

Corrective Exercise

Corrective exercise deals with the rewiring of old, imbalanced muscular patterns and replacing them with more natural ones. It is this aspect in the process that determines whether you are going to move correctly or incorrectly. The importance of understanding the proper biomechanics of how to do this cannot be overemphasized.Â If you don’t understand the concept of pelvic extension and you are trying to correct a lower back dysfunction, you might just make the problem even worse than what it was. If done correctly, corrective exercise can work miracles. If Static Stretching and Myofascial release are strategically implemented before to allow for better mobility, Corrective exercise can be optimally utilized.

Multi-plane Ballistic Movement

Over the years of studying the maximization of Propioception (body’s automatic sense of movement), I have come to realize that the majority of exercise regimens only go so far, when real-time physical stimulus is placed upon the body. After re-alignment techniques were taught to me, I began utilizing textbook exercises that targeted one plane of motion at a time.

They were great at the moment for the purpose of setting a solid foundation to build around, but then I didn’t know where to go after that. If I didn’t want to have to add more weight to an exercise, then what do I do? It was here that I began tinkering (consciously and unconsciously) with the dynamics of putting planes of motion together, and momentum and rhythm coming along for the ride. I began figuring out that athletes, like offensive linemen in American Football, move loads while in motion, while having to be graceful, all at the same time. I was seeing this pattern in all athletics, and it was becoming obvious to me that what I learned from books wasn’t going far enough.

Athletes have to be agile and graceful, while having to be centered and powerful, all at the same time. If the athlete loses footing, in conjunction to the rest of his body, he will have no force output in anything he does. The stronger the he is in this realm, the less compensation happening within real-time, the better the performance. This also applies in the aspect of getting injured while training. If bad compensation occurs because of a poor center of gravity during movement, the joints take the load because there’s no one else to take it for them.

My system of Multi-plane Ballistic Movement takes the elements of real-time agility, resistance and flow and puts it all into one. Mastery of this is crucial if you expect to increase your physical performance and have sustenance within your training regimen. Without grace your stuck!

Movements through every plane of motion are essential to any exercise regimen. Biologically we have evolved to move in multiple directions. If you analyze how muscular anatomy works by looking at most athletic sports, you will see that we are supposed to challenge our bodies in all planes. Sadly, over the last few years I have witnessed many exercise regimens that seem to be obsessed over one plane of motion before all others. That plane of motion is the Sagittal Plane.

Now why would this be, especially if you consider the variety of exercises you can create in the other planes as well as the Sagittal. Simple explanation: the Sagittal plane is by far the easiest to teach of all planes. Why? Because its something we are used to doing every single day of our lives. Everything we do in our realities is forward and back, so training that plane makes things very easy on the trainer. When I first started as a trainer, I was set in the Sagittal Plane.

All my personal workouts, as well as my client workouts, consisted of primarily forward to back motions. Looking back, I probably would have been appalled by my lack of knowledge. After years of research and thousands of hours of obsessive experimentation, I realized that this needed to change.

It wasn’t until I started analyzing combat sports that the significance of the other two planes came to my complete attention. After participating in Boxing and Muay Thai, it became glaringly obvious that Transverse plane (rotation of punches, kicks) and Frontal plane (lateral movement, head movement) motions were extremely important to implement within my personal routines.

Further confirmation of this came when I started to look at Football, Hockey, Lacrosse, Soccer, Baseball and pretty much all sports and the importance of the other two planes. I began to learn about lower back and knee injuries occurring in people, because of joints abruptly moving in way they weren’t used to being put in before.

After learning the information, I brought it to my attention that all my clients, as well as myself, need to implement this with every person if I ever expected to master my craft. Over the last few years I have developed a system called Multi-plane Ballistic Movement, which incorporates all these planes put into each exercise.

Pendulum Movement

Pendulum Movements have become a major staple in my system of movement, because they specifically adapt us to the random stimulus our planet places upon us. One of the main challengers to our proprioceptive nervous system is the rhythmic movement involved in locomotion (walking, running, most sports, etc.). All movements within locomotion are really just controlled falling.

After many years of analyzing the martial arts and many other sports, one thing has become astonishingly clear to me: the athlete with better adaption in locomotion generally is the winner in most sports. If you analyze a boxing great like Floyd Mayweather, you will see that this guy relies greatly on rhythm and timing when implementing his strategies. He’s rarely in a bad position, so he is seldomly ever hit by a punch. His conditioning is rarely ever off, because he never really wastes any movement in the entirety of a boxing match.

As the great Larry Merchant stated : “He fights as naturally as a fish swims.” Floyd Mayweather’s success in the ring is a result of how well his body maintains its structural integrity while moving in different planes of motion, all while having to deal with random forces happening during a fight. This is the case when it comes to the majority of all athletes in the majority of all sports. If your body can’t adjust on the fly, your structural integrity will be compromised and you won’t be efficient anymore and that leads to poor performance and injury.

Pendulum movements specifically train you for these random actions happening within a sport. These exercises provide the stimulus necessary to engage the right muscle systems at the right time. Timing is everything in all the actions of life, and my pendulum exercises will ensure that you are adjustable to the rhythms of our planet.

Cable-bar System

If you want to talk about maximum functionality with one piece of exercise equipment, nothing tops my Cable-bar system. The cable-bar allows the transverse plane (rotational motion) to be maximized to its fullest potential, because both sides of the upper body are working together at the same time, a push and a pull are involved in each motion. Mix this in in with some Multi-plane Ballistic Movement and you have yourself one of the most efficient exercise systems ever created. There’s more information to come, stay tuned!

Posture

Correcting bad posture through the utilization of Structural Integration is maybe the most important yet underutilized type of training in the realm of functional training. The majority of all training systems used by personal trainers run around a methodology set up with no foundations in place. The Neglect of this cannot be underestimated.

Picture training your body similar to building a house. If you expect to make a quality house, you cannot assume that you take a bunch of wood slap it together and that a structure is going to arise that will last for 100 years. A quality home is always going to be set up with a foundation first. You level off the ground, set in the footings, build a platform and then you start building the rest of the house. It’s quite a practical way of building a house, yet when it comes to training a human body it has become something trainers and wellness practitioners avoid like the plague.

Much like the house, the human body is a structural system that needs a center of gravity built in. If you do not start by building some type of a foundation, the human body will not perform well. That means if you want to execute something like a squat or a lunge without it not being detrimental to the wellness of the body, u have to get to the root of what makes a biomechanically weak squat in the first place. If you train with a dysfunctional support system, it will only build more dysfunction, hence making the exercising destructive and no longer sustainable.

Structural Integration applies to all training modalities and goals when it comes to training a human body. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, you need to have a strong structural unit. If you want to run faster, you need to have a strong structural unit. If you want to punch harder and faster, you need to have a strong structural unit. If you want to live pain injury free, you need to have a strong structural unit. The list goes on. If a training system does not comprehensively address the structural foundations humans operate from, it will only do damage to the human body and is not worth doing at all.

At Functional Patterns, every technique implemented is intentionally utilized for the sake of improving human movement dynamics and posture. Whether we are implementing advanced forms of Myofascial Release, Corrective Static Stretching or Integrated Corrective Exercise, you can know that the system is geared to helping you accomplish your fitness goals and implementing what is necessary at the core of it all. We also take an aggressive approach to addressing poor posture, so that every time a mechanical adjustment is set in place, we can expect it to hold in place for good.

By comprehensively addressing posture at a foundation, we can secure that we will find sustainability in your fitness training regimen so that you may find yourself exercising pain and injury free for decades to come!

Weightloss

Sustaining a healthy bodyfat is one of these most important aspects of a healthy body. High bodyfat is an all too common occurrence in our culture and it is becoming an epidemic. This epidemic has spawned an entire industry predicated upon attempting to address this issue, but it is quite evident that so many systems in place are coming up short. At Functional Patterns, we get at the root of what is creating the body’s mechanisms towards wanting to hold on to unnecessary bodyfat.

Most bodyfat problems are usually hormonal deficiencies manifesting themselves in a way that promotes the increase of fat mass. So many systems out there operate solely within the context of hoping nutrition alone can account for the excessive increases of bodyfat. Others attempt to utilize hormonal therapies to address this complicated manner. The problem with both of these methods is that they don’t get at the root patterns creating the problem in the first place. Before the body can produce a hormone linked to fat storage (example: Cortisol), it has to receive a signal from the nervous system first. Nutrition and Hormone therapies do not address this phenomenon, although it might not be at the root of the majority of people’s bodyfat issues.

At Functional Patterns, we train the brain and body to operate as a system that does not need to store bodyfat. If we train the body and brain to understand where balance is, it will be much less likely that it will stimulate the hormones linked to bodyfat gains. By implementing the Functional Patterns bodyfat reduction system, you can drop the bodyfat you need to and maintain it for a lifetime!

Athletic Performance

The majority of all strength training and athletic performance systems in the industry have failed to account for several aspects found in sports. In fact, most “strength and conditioning” programs are at the root of making biomechanical technique worse. This is due to their inability to understand what is mechanically efficient from inefficient. If the practitioner themselves does not know what is technically right from wrong, it is likely they will progress an athlete into an exercise too soon, hence ruining the athletes’ ability to achieve efficient performance in their specific sport. For example, current training systems also do not account for the 3 planes of motion found in nearly all athletics.

This is a foundational flaw that is found in all training systems available in today’s athletic training and sports performance regimens. If a body is moving in 3 dimensions when playing a sport, training it in 2 dimensions will only hinder the body’s performance in the long term. This and many other reasons is the main reason why most training systems involved with training athletes can only go so far. The Functional Patterns approach is one more concerned with involving the exact dynamics that are intrinsically wired into the nervous systems of world champions.

The Functional Patterns approach to athletic performance is maybe the most progressive and comprehensive available in the athletic performance industry today. Our perspective is that the training itself must consist of the exact biomechanical phenomenons found in sports if one expects to get positive applications to reality with their training regimen. Elements such as functional dynamic muscle elasticity, inner unit core function, transverse plane movement, multi-plane ballistic movement, horizontal plyometric training are just a few of the elements found in the Functional Patterns training system.

Whether you are looking to get to the highest levels as a professional athlete or wanting to run a marathon, the Functional Patterns Athletic Performance training system will get you on the fast track to success.

MMA Training

At Functional Patterns, our MMA Training system is catered to building the foundations necessary for better athletics in MMA. Every world class champion embodies traits of functionality within the bio-mechanical structure of their movements. What the Functional Patterns methodology does is unlock the ability to master the necessary foundations to build a more technically sound and physically adaptable fighter. MMA Training is not just for those who seek to compete in the arena, it is also fantastic for developing the functional strength and coordination found in many of life’s daily challenges.